In wireless communication systems, channel state information at a transmitter, for example, at a base station, is important for beam-forming transmissions (also referred to as precoding) that deliver more power to a targeted user while minimizing interference on other users. Precoding operations can be in the context of single-user multiple input multiple output (SU-MIMO) or multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), where two or more users are served by a single base station. An eNB needs accurate spatial channel information in order to perform a high rank transmission to a single UE or to perform precoding to two or more UEs simultaneously so that the mutual interference among multiple transmissions can be minimized at each UE.
Precoding operations may also be in the context of SU/MU-MIMO users served by coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmissions where antennas belonging to different eNBs, rather than to the same eNB, can coordinate their precoding to serve multiple users simultaneously. Further support for up to eight transmit antennas is enabled in the next generation cellular standards like 3GPP LTE Release-10. Due to such a relatively large number of antennas (4-Tx or 8-Tx) involved in such transmissions, it is desirable that the UE feedback be designed efficiently with good performance overhead trade-off, so that feedback does not scale linearly with the increasing number of antennas.
The antenna configurations which support a large number of antennas in practice must allow large beamforming gains and also larger spatial multiplexing gains achieved from higher rank transmission. Beamforming allows efficient support for low geometry users and also for multi-user transmission thereby improving cell-edge and cell-average throughput with larger number of users in the system, while spatial multiplexing allows higher peak spectral efficiency. A typical antenna configuration to achieve this would be to have groups of antennas where each group is a set of correlated antennas and each group is uncorrelated with the other groups. A cross-polarized antenna configuration is one such setup. The correlated antenna elements provide the required beamforming gains and the uncorrelated antenna elements enable high rank transmissions.
The above structure in the antennas has some unique spatial characteristics that can be exploited. For example, the correlation among correlated antennas changes slowly and is confined to a smaller vector space on an average. This can be used to feedback the correlated and uncorrelated channel characteristics, i.e., two components, at different rates and/or with different levels of quantization/overhead in time and frequency to reduce feedback overhead. One of the components representing the correlated channel characteristics can be fed back on a wideband basis and/or slowly in time, while the other component is fed back on a subband basis and/or more frequently in time.
However, one of the key challenges in designing such a two component feedback system is identifying the parameters used in the two components and the construction of the final precoder matrix as a function of the two components.
The various aspects, features and advantages of the invention will become more fully apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon a careful consideration of the following Detailed Description thereof with the accompanying drawings described below. The drawings may have been simplified for clarity and are not necessarily drawn to scale.